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But photography may have been the furthest thing from his mind when he graduated high school in 1955; a decade after World War II had ended. With little hope of affording college, the Wyoming native enlisted in the Air Force, looking forward to learning a marketable trade as an electrician. Just one problem stood in his way––the Air Force discovered that he was technically color blind, unable to distinguish certain shades of browns and greens. “This meant they didn’t want me working with the wiring in such things as radars, radios, and nuclear devices,” he remarks facetiously. Instead, though Currier will never know why, the military decided photography would be a much more suitable field for him. At the time, he didn’t exactly concur. “Joy at the prospect of becoming a photographer wasn’t one of my emotions as I boarded the Greyhound for my journey to the USAF Photographic Training School in Denver, Colorado.”
His first weeks consisted of learning the mechanical aspects of the camera, lenses, film, shutters, diaphragms, etc. and how they were used to control light. However, none of this could fully prepare him for the 20-pound contraption he would be working with: an 8” x 10” view camera complete with a wooden tripod. “The thing used a double-sided film holder, into which two sheets of 8" x 10” film, a 12 ASA, orthochromatic emulsion, was loaded by hand, by the student. The choice of ortho film, which only ‘sees’ blue and green light, was so that the first attempt of loading film into the holder could be done with a red safelight. This allowed the student to see what he was doing. Shooting a single image with this beast was a long and time-consuming situation: Nowhere near cutting-edge even for the '50s,” Currier says.
But like so many others under photography’s spell, it was the allure and enchantment of the darkroom that sparked Currier’s profound love for the art. “We took the film holder with its exposed film into the darkroom,” he says, “again with red safelights, and proceeded to develop it. Carefully trying to handle only the edges, we slipped the sheets into the developer. I have never forgotten the thrill of watching my first image start to emerge from that red-tinted blankness. It was pure magic!” Culture Shock
“The streets were poorly illuminated with street lights, but ablaze with neon. I was dazzled by a fairyland of signs, mostly in Japanese but with an occasional word or phrase in broken English, adding to the strangeness. Every color of the spectrum seemed to be reflected off the wet pavement and filtered through the water droplets on the bus windows. The bus was driving on the ‘wrong side’ of the road, and this added an element of apprehension to the experience. For the next two years I spent a major portion of my off-duty time in one of the most beautiful and intriguing places I had ever seen…. Thus began my love affair with Japan.”
But with a little help from his new-found photographic passion, Currier didn’t let anything deter him from turning potential bad experiences into beautiful ones. And he never stopped learning from them. “A stroll in the countryside, through the rice paddies on a hot summer day, was a dreadful olfactory experience. ‘Night soil’ (human waste) was the prime fertilizer. It was mixed with the irrigation water, and the stench could be overpowering. But this was offset by the incredible images that presented themselves to my eye and my cameras.”
Currier’s visual style is primarily influenced by the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson and his monumental book The Decisive Moment. After almost fifty years of making pictures, Currier still echoes the sentiments of the master who, after 25 years of experience, still regarded himself as an amateur (a word that in Cartier-Bresson’s French originally meant ‘lover’ or ‘one who loves’). “[Cartier-Bresson’s] ‘decisive moments’ were so wonderful and alive, as were the images by the great photographers for LIFE, Magnum and the Black Star agency. My dream was to have something published in LIFE. Around this time the ‘Available Light’ movement was going full blast, and I got caught up in it. The availability of new films that could record images in low-level light situations, along with new ‘fast’ lenses and new developers that allowed for ‘forced’ processing while keeping the grain manageable, gave me tools to record images in locations and situations that had been impossible before.”
Moving to San Francisco in 1962, Currier found it difficult to get decent work in the photographic field. “I sold cameras and hi-fi equipment for awhile, worked as the assistant to a clothing store credit manager and finally ended up as a combination order desk/buyer for a ship chandler catering to the steamship industry. I did that for 30 years.”
Which leads to perhaps one of Currier’s most recent exhilarating moments, taking third place (People category) in Canon’s first EOS Digital Rebel contest. “’The Red Bags’ was shot when I was on one of my periodic ‘photo prowls,’" Currier says. "I have been fascinated with the play of light and shadow and these patterned sidewalks for some time. I was looking down from a pedestrian over pass, watching the people walking below. A high fog created a light that was soft and almost shadow-less--typical San Francisco.
“The original image was cropped, taking out some tree leaves on the left and a wall on the right. This tightened the scene and helped focus the eye on the man with his bags against the repeating pattern of the sidewalk. I also felt the bags needed to stand out and this was accomplished by careful digital selection and increasing the saturation very slightly using Adobe Photoshop Elements 3. “When I found out I had placed in Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel contest, I was mostly stunned. One thing I would like to know is how the judges arrived at their decisions. It would help me grow as a photographer," Currier says. He is thankful, however, for photoworkshop.com. "I signed up for the $2.00 trial membership, deciding that this was a place I could advance my skills, and it has!"
Today, Currier continues to challenge himself and his imagination, often creating his own projects from commonplace scenes or situations. “Recently, I realized that there were a myriad of photographic possibilities in everywhere,” he says. “Images, visual essays that we all look at every day and yet don’t see: a handprint in the concrete, the outline of some leaves painted on the sidewalk by their decay, an abandoned vacuum cleaner. Ordinary things that are easily overlooked. Cartier-Bresson writes, ‘There is subject in all that takes place in the world, as well as in our personal universe.’ A lesson I try to observe every time I take a camera in hand.” © Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com |
